Serverside.ai Achieves ISO/IEC 27001 Certification

The Engineering team responsible for Serverside.ai, the open dynamic ad insertion platform powered by Equativ, is excited to announce that we have earned the ISO/IEC 27001 certification for Information Security Management. This internationally recognized certification reaffirms our team’s commitment to protecting all sensitive data that flows through our ad insertion technology and ensuring secure, seamless experiences for content providers, advertisers, and viewers alike.

ISO/IEC 27001 is the global standard for implementing and managing information security systems. To us at Serverside.ai, achieving this certification validates our efforts in safeguarding data integrity and privacy throughout the SSAI workflows, which involve real-time ad insertion or substitution into video streams for over-the-top (OTT) platforms, broadcast channels, and live streaming environments.

Protecting Viewer Data and Ensuring Seamless Ad Delivery

SSAI involves stitching ads directly into content streams on the server side, making it essential to ensure that both ad and viewer data are handled securely. By obtaining ISO/IEC 27001 certification, Serverside.ai guarantees:

• Secure Handling of Viewer Data: Protecting the personally identifiable information (PII) and behavioral data used to deliver targeted ads, preventing unauthorized access or misuse.
  
• Safe Integration with Ad Servers: Ensuring secure connections between our SSAI platform, ad servers, and content delivery networks (CDNs), reducing vulnerabilities during ad decisioning and insertion processes.
  
• Data Privacy Compliance: Meeting global data protection regulations such as GDPR and CCPA, ensuring the platform's operation aligns with evolving legal requirements.

"Our ISO/IEC 27001 certification reflects the team’s unwavering commitment to providing a secure and compliant environment for our clients, partners, and for the viewers. As the demand for SSAI solutions in streaming media continues to grow, this certification is a crucial step in maintaining trust and security across the ad insertion value chain.” - Leander Carell, Co-Founder and Managing Director at Serverside.ai

Enabling Trust and Innovation in Ad-Supported Streaming

Since SSAI has become the go-to technology for dynamic ad insertion in premium streaming content, protecting user data while ensuring uninterrupted ad delivery is critical to our platform’s success. ISO/IEC 27001 certification enhances Serverside.ai’s ability to deliver secure, reliable solutions for content providers and advertisers, offering:

• Enhanced Data Security for Targeted Ads: Safeguarding the granular viewer data used to serve personalized ads, ensuring both the accuracy of targeting and the privacy of users.
  
• Fraud Prevention in Ad Insertion: Mitigating risks of ad fraud, including domain spoofing and ad stacking, by securing the ad insertion process from malicious attacks.
  
• Reliable and Seamless Ad Delivery: Protecting the platform’s integrity to ensure that ads are inserted smoothly without disrupting the viewer experience or causing buffering issues.

"If you want to only take-away one thing from this experience, here it is: don't try to automate your security process; automate your daily doing with security baked in, instead! I have heard people saying that security is an afterthought for several reasons: because it doesn't feed into the bottom line, or it's a distraction, or it's impossible to automate properly. By making security controlling a management task which is lived as a good habit, and documented throughout regular work in the teams by automation, I have discovered that you can bake security into daily doings and deliver better security at a lower cost. This naturally pays into your bottom line by raising confidence with your Tier 1 customers. I’m very thankful to the Serverside.ai team for joining me on this exciting journey.” - Ronald Wertlen, Head of Development and Engineering at Serverside.ai

ISO/IEC 27001 Certification: Key Takeaways and Looking Ahead

Reflecting on our path to certification, our Head of Development and Engineering Ronald Wertlen, who led the team, came up with some key learnings - and suggestions - for companies involved in a similar process. From our experience, these are the three recommendations you should keep in mind when approaching ISO and other top-notch certifications:

• Get a good consultant (or someone who has guided the process before), this will lay down the tracks you need to follow and demystify the tasks;
  
• Get top level buy-in from day one and "market" or "champion" that buy-in throughout the team: it is the only way to get the team as a whole to pay attention to this topic while creating value;
  
• Automate people's involvement after having built up security awareness within the employees, so that the documentation of daily to do’s feeds into the ISMS KPIs.

With the understandable concerns over data privacy and security in digital advertising and video streaming, we wanted to ensure publishers, advertisers and other tech vendors that we take these topics very seriously and we strive to apply all the existing best practices - and always look for more advanced ones - to keep everyone’s data safe. The ISO/IEC 27001 certification we have now achieved clearly reflects our team’s dedication and positions us as a trusted partner in the ever-evolving advertising and streaming ecosystem.

To learn more about Serverside.ai and our commitment to secure and compliant ad insertion technology, please write to serverside.ai@equativ.com or fill out our contact form.

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